The Divine Cities Trilogy: City of Stairs, City of Blades, and City of Miracles, With an Excerpt From Foundryside

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  Sigrud sighs and closes his eyes, wondering what to do. He was never really a case officer, but he remembers Vinya telling him once: Always tell a source you’ll come back to them. Tell them they’re safe. Tell them whatever they want to hear. Anything. A desperate source will believe the wildest lies.

  How I hate myself, he thinks, for falling back on Vinya’s advice at such a time.

  * * *

  —

  Taty blinks slowly, her knees against her chest on the back porch. Sigrud sits beside her, huge and slumping next to this short, frail girl, her hands filthy with oil and grease.

  “Two weeks, then,” she says.

  “Yes. Maybe more. But not very long, really.”

  “But you might not come back.”

  “I…I will come back,” he says. “I will.”

  She says nothing.

  “I’ve asked Ivanya to continue your lessons.” He tries to smile at her. “I said I wanted you to try all the weapons. I meant it.”

  Still she says nothing.

  “I will be back,” he says. “As soon as I can.”

  “Did you know,” says Taty, “that I dreamed about you last night?”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes. I dreamed you’d go away. But I dreamed you’d come back far sooner than we expected. Than you expected, even. It would be as if you hadn’t even left.”

  He smiles. “Perhaps we’ll be lucky.”

  “Luck has nothing to do with it,” she says, and her voice is missing all the affected wisdom he’s used to hearing. These are the dry, firm tones of a confident woman. “What will be will be.”

  What troubles you, then? What ails you?

  A drink of water, surely? Then summon you a water sprite, a child Divine

  To sprinkle sweet drops upon your tongue.

  Speak her name forcefully enough, speak it with power,

  And she shall be forced to listen, and come.

  So speak! Speak! Speak, and see!

  —MENDING THE MUSE’S MEDDLE (V.III.315–21), AUTHOR OF PLAY UNKNOWN

  Alone. Again.

  All his old sea training comes back to him as Sigrud pilots the little ketch east along the Continental shore. For hours at a time it is only him, the ache in his side, the wind, and the beastly squalls on the horizon, battlements of dark, curling storms, dragging behind a hazy veil of thick rain. He says not a word for these travels, not to himself. He lost much use for words over the years alone in the wilderness. As civilization fades on the horizon behind him, that deep, thoughtless silence returns to him.

  His side hurts, but not as much as he expected. Ivanya provided him with some painkillers, but not the opiate sort, so he can still do his duties while sailing. It’s not easy, but he manages.

  He drops anchor only twice, first in the tiny Shuri Islands. Some nomadic Saypuri tribe has set up on the eastern rim of the largest one, and since they cannot build on the land they build on the sea, little huts and piers set on stilts. He pays them a small fee for fresh water and some salted fish. They pore over the handful of drekels as if it were a fortune.

  The next time, he drops anchor at the edge of the Sartoshan. He has his nautical maps now, so he’s able to use the code Mulaghesh gave him to target a much more specific area.

  A tiny lagoon, right at the top of the Sartoshan. International waters, almost—that subject, like so many things relating to territory and sovereignty, is always dreadfully tricky on the Continent. But if he were going to hide anything, it’d be in a place like that.

  He folds up the map and stares out at the horizon. He hopes there’s something there. He hopes he didn’t endanger Taty and Ivanya over nothing. He hopes that, come a few days, he will no longer be moving in blind desperation.

  It’s at times like this that he misses her the most. She always knew what to do. Where to go. Who to see.

  Shara, he thinks, am I a fool to try this? Would you do this? Or is this what got you killed?

  * * *

  —

  Two days later Sigrud sails along the Jukoshtan coast, watching as the cliffs climb and climb north of him, climbing until they become the Mashevs, the tallest mountains in the known world, much taller than the Tarsils. This tiny isthmus of land, hardly five hundred miles wide, is all that connects the Continent to Saypur, yet with the Mashevs in the way it might as well be an ocean in between the two.

  The Mashev River (if Sigrud recalls what Shara once said, all of this region is named after some Jukoshtani saint who died out here after a particularly wild party) is a narrow thread of water that must become a raging torrent in spring, when the snowpack melts. He finds the first of the long, thin islands that cluster around its delta and steers around them, mindful of the lagoon’s shallow waters.

  Then he sees it.

  It looks like a building in the distance, perhaps a long, low, slumping bunker built atop the fattest of the isles. Then he gets closer, and closer.

  It’s a massive ship, over a thousand feet long. Sigrud never had much to do with the Saypuri Navy—his maritime experiences as a Dreyling in the North Sea were with far more primitive vessels—so even he’s a bit taken aback by the size of the wrecked dreadnought. Its wreckage is obscene, tangles of metal and debris lodged in the delicate white sands of the lagoon. The beaches glitter with metal, yet most of the debris is rusted over, devoured by the sea spray and the elements.

  He pilots his ketch over to an appealing side of the island, then drops anchor. Ivanya’s man provided him with a canvas inflatable raft—a new innovation he’s not sure he can bring himself to trust—but he manages to inflate it, set it in the waves, and climb aboard, rowing to shore with the two measly little oars.

  He drags the raft up onto the beach and tries to find something to tie it to, as the winds here are fierce. There’s a beaten, bitter-looking tree sprouting from the soil a bit beyond the beach. He lashes the raft up, taking care to avoid the jagged, rusted shards of metal on the ground, then steps back to review his work.

  On the second step back, something crunches unpleasantly under his bootheel. He looks down. A sliver of something gray-white has surfaced from the sands.

  He steps aside, kneels, and pushes the sand away. He recognizes what’s below almost immediately. He’s dug things like this up before, after all.

  Vertebrae, scattered through the sand. Neck vertebrae, from their width. And just next to them, a skull with two iron teeth.

  He digs more. Though the corpse is old, he finds fragments of their clothing. Buttons and medals and pins. He holds one button up and blows the sand off of it. He’s seen such buttons before, many times, running down the pert, handsome blue uniforms of the Saypuri Navy.

  He drops the button and sits back on his haunches, staring in the direction of the wrecked dreadnought. Its hull is split and torn, forming something like ribs, gray light slanting through the gaps. He stands and squints and shields his eyes, looking at the beach leading up to the ruined ship.

  He spies lumps in the sand. Calcified forms that he now suspects are certainly not seashells.

  Sigrud grabs a torch, his lockpicks, a pistol, and his knife. Then he walks toward the wreck of the SS Salim, stepping around the bones lying in the sand, the jumbled, skeletal remains of the several hundred souls who surely once served aboard that behemoth.

  Some of the skulls have been crushed. And though he can’t be certain, one such skull has been crushed in a manner that’s highly reminiscent of fingers, as if it was destroyed by human hands.

  * * *

  —

  He approaches the bow of the ship, which has mostly held together. The Salim is about four or five stories tall, a massive construction, though it’s tipped very slightly toward the west, so it’s hard for him to get perspective on its size.

  He comes to the starboard side of the bow and looks
up along its hull. The ship has bowed slightly as it’s laid for however many years on the curving surface of the island, causing its sides to split and separate like someone bending a piece of soft cheese. The hull is ragged and gaping at the seams, with rivets sticking out as though a drunk tried to put the thing together. Though Sigrud’s a skilled climber, even this gives him pause.

  Still, he thinks. Nothing else to do.

  Grimacing, he pulls on a pair of thick leather gloves and approaches one seam that runs all the way up the hull. He should be able to hold on to either side of the seam, wedge himself inside to bridge the gap, and slowly climb up using his hands and feet on either side.

  Provided everything holds together, of course. Which is by no means a guarantee.

  He starts up. The hull is incredibly thick, especially along the armored belt—the portion of the ship’s sides that would be just above the waterline, where a shell could strike it—so it’s quite sturdy. He could even crawl through the bulkhead to the inner decks, but he’s unwilling to try this. To enter where the ship is terribly damaged would be suicidal.

  But he can tell something’s different about the Salim, from the sliver of the interior he can see as he climbs. Most dreadnoughts would have what’s called a citadel, a heavily armored “box” beneath the four main gun turrets, protecting their ammunition and the ship’s coal bunkers from being penetrated by an enemy shell. He’s trafficked in naval intelligence, so he’s aware of such an engineering feat—yet what he glimpses through the cracks of the ship’s hull is…unusual.

  He pauses about midway up, makes sure his feet are tightly wedged into the seam, pulls out a torch, and flicks it on.

  The two fore ammunition stores have been heavily altered. He can see no feeds running up to the two fore gun turrets above, meaning the guns wouldn’t have been battle-ready. The ammunition chambers are still there, but they’ve been merged into one chamber, and it’s been closed off, and has been heavily, heavily armored, to the point where the chamber is nearly as armored as the belt running along the sides of the ship.

  Which makes him wonder—what could they have been keeping in there, if not ammunition?

  He grunts, puts the torch away, and continues up.

  Finally he comes to the main deck. The gap in the hull is getting wider and wider as he goes up, until he realizes he won’t be able to bridge the gap anymore. Sighing, he swivels so he’s clinging to one side of the seam, pinching it between his feet and palms, and slowly, slowly hauls himself up.

  The main deck of the ship is tilting, so while he very badly wishes to roll onto the top and catch his breath, he’s aware that this would send him rolling down the deck until he tumbled off the port side. So instead he crawls over and holds on to the railing, breathing hard and wishing he’d brought kneepads with him, as some of the torn plates snagged his legs.

  Then he sits up and freezes. “What in the hells…?”

  The deck of the Salim has been…decorated. Specifically, they appear to have removed the two fore gun turrets and, in their place, they have used some kind of welding torch to melt a sigil or glyph of some kind into the deck—a mark referring to one of the Continental Divinities.

  Sigrud stares at this, unable to comprehend it. The idea of a piece of equipment belonging to the Saypuri Military essentially being blessed by one of the Continental Divinities is unthinkable. He stands, wobbling a little on the slanted surface, and tries to get a better view of it.

  The sigil is familiar, he finds: the jagged top, sloping swoop below, and curling sash….He remembers Shara making something like that once in Taalvashtan, burning the symbol into a big wooden board with a match, and then they both had to hold the piece of wood above their heads as they walked over ground that had been cursed.

  What was it she said? It comes swimming up to him, slowly: Kolkan’s Sanctuary, she told him. It dampens the effects of any Divine activity occurring below or above it—except Kolkan’s, of course. Story has it Kolkan created it specifically because Jukov and his followers kept trying to break into Kolkan’s monasteries to debauch his virginal followers, and he got quite sick of it. He burned this symbol into the entrances and exits of his monasteries so no one could miraculously penetrate the grounds….

  Sigrud cocks his head, looking at it. He gauges that the refurbished ammunition chamber he saw through the split hull is directly below the sigil.

  He considers where to begin. Whatever was happening on the SS Salim, it seems it was approved by the Saypuri government in some form or fashion: one doesn’t do massive internal refurbishments to the interior of a dreadnought without considerable resources and skilled labor.

  So start with the officers, he thinks, and command. He looks back at the ship’s bridge, then down at the main deck between it and where he currently stands. The deck is split in many places, like a roadway that’s just been through an earthquake. Some of the armor plating has collapsed entirely. One wrong step and he’ll tumble into a ragged chasm of torn metal.

  He sighs and stretches his quadriceps. Let’s hope I haven’t gained too much weight.

  * * *

  —

  He has to jump only twice to cross the splintering deck. Both times he hangs above a dark, rusty gorge for one instant, the torn decks yawning below him, before his boots slam down on the plating on the other side. Both times he’s convinced the ruined metal won’t hold him, and it will bend and buckle beneath his heels, sending him spilling down to be shredded to death. Both times he’s wrong.

  Lucky, he thinks. Very lucky.

  He approaches the bridge ladder and finds a ruined door lying at the bottom. It’s the door that would normally lead into the bridge, and from the look of its pulverized deadbolts it was locked when it was ripped out of its doorway. He touches the metal, noting how it’s been nearly ripped in two. He touches one rent, and can’t help but feel that they match human digits, as if someone had grabbed the metal in one hand like a piece of wet clay and given it a mighty tug.

  He climbs the ladder bridge and looks in. The controls have been destroyed, and the floor is littered with bones and refuse and bird droppings. Whatever took place here happened long ago, as the only smells he can catch are salt and rust.

  He looks to the aft of the ship. The main deck there is rent and ravaged in a very strange fashion. The force of the damage seems to have come from below, as if someone fired a shell up through the ship.

  Or perhaps something else. Maybe something clawed its way through the various decks and burst out like a bird of prey breaking through a forest canopy.

  He hops back down the ladder and rounds the platform until he finds the entrance to the captain’s stateroom.

  The door is locked, but it’s in some state of decay, so with a few stout kicks Sigrud’s able to cave it in. He switches on his torch and climbs in. Like most staterooms, this one is or at least once was quite fancy, considering the environs, with a leather sofa, several paintings, and—most important—a private head. The room must have flooded at one point, though, based on the water marks on the walls.

  Sigrud walks over to the desk and pulls out the drawers, which scream and squawk. The bottom one has a bunch of moldering files in it, stained beyond legibility. The second one has a revolving pistol and a box of ammunition, though he doubts if the bullets are any good after the flood. The top drawer is locked.

  Sigrud looks around and finds a piece of iron plating that has fallen off the wall. He picks it up, shoves it into the gap above the drawer, and gives it a kick.

  The drawer pops open with a crunch. Inside is a leather-bound journal. It seems to have escaped most of the water.

  He pulls it out and flips through the pages. Some have sustained water damage, causing the ink to run, but a few at the middle are readable. He holds it up to the light and reads:

  …n and blast if I cannot wait for this to be over. Today is the wor
st day in recent memory. I had to cut down a member of the crew this morning. Kudal, his name was, Petty Officer 3rd Class. He hung himself in the lower decks last night. And though no one said so I know very few could blame him for it.

  As cowardly and unpatriotic as it might seem, this is one duty I desperately wish to end. It is a waste of our time, a waste of our resources, and though we are not in any physical danger, I sincerely believe that this duty is causing psychological harm to my crew. I hope we have no more like Kudal. But I doubt we shall be so lucky.

  Worst of all, I cannot personally imagine how that thing belowdecks could help military intelligence in any way. I want to tell her to just be done with it and slaughter the thing—but to be honest I am not sure if such a thing can be slain.

  I will distribute ear guards to the crew tonight. The pounding and the screaming could be heard even up in the depths of the fo’c’s’le, and none can sleep. I can even hear it myself on the nights when the thing gets ornery. And it does tend to get angrier at night, or at least louder.

  I do not like the nights out here. They taste wrong to me. There is too much night, and not enough moon, if that makes any sense.

  —LIEUTENANT COMMANDER BABURAO VERMA, 17TH OF THE MONTH OF THE SNAKE, 1717

  Another visit from Ghaladesh today. She comes boating in on that damned yacht looking like an industry heiress—which I suppose she is. If politics could be an industry, Vinya Komayd would most certainly be its most lauded scion.

  Once again the crew and I stayed above deck while she and her toadies interviewed it. I much prefer it when the other toadies do the interviewing, as they are not half so severe about dictating our duties to us.

  I could tell they hit the thing with the lights again because it howled and howled like the most monstrous of squalls. I am sure you could have heard its howling up in the Mashevs. Some of the men grew sick and I had to find a place for them to be seen to as I could not send them to their quarters or to the medical bay, for that of course was belowdecks. We eventually simply treated them on the bridge. It is not like we shall ever sail this ship anywhere, anyway. We are a floating prison, not a proud vessel of our nation.